St. Joseph, Minnesota

St. Joseph was laid out in eighteen fifty-five in what is now Stearns County, planting one of the earliest German Catholic communities in central Minnesota. Benedictine sisters came from the East in the late eighteen fifties and eventually settled here.

Their Saint Benedict's Academy was founded in eighteen eighty-nine, and that school grew into the College of Saint Benedict in nineteen thirteen, today one of the country's leading Catholic liberal arts colleges for women. The monastery and college still anchor this small city, giving St. Joseph a presence far larger than its population suggests.